An Ancestral Labyrinth Meditation

There are a myriad of different meditations you can use to connect with your ancestral energy flow. The only limitation is in your imagination. There’s one meditation in particular that I use often that involves the use of a labyrinth. My favorite labyrinth is the Cretan, seven circuit labyrinth. It’s a visible representation for me of the Yoruban belief that if you do not know seven generations of your family line you cannot know who you are. It was that thought that prompted the start of my personal ancestor work more than a decade ago.

I like layers to magic and meditation. So when I walk the labyrinth, I am physically moving in spiraling patterns on a horizontal landscape. And at the same time as I walk, I pull my kundalini energy upward through my body on the vertical axis of the seven chakras. When I do this, I become the meeting point of these two planes. And where they meet in me, a doorway to my ancestors opens within my heart center, the mid-point of the chakras.

When I step into the labyrinth, taking my first turn into the track, my energy sits as the base of my spine, in my root chakra, the home of instinct. I think about my parents, both of whom are still living. They are the bridge between me and those who came before them. As I walk this first track, I fill my heart with gratitude for them, for breath, for body and bone.

I turn sharply onto the second track, aligning my sacral chakra of emotion, the house of intuition, with the memories of my grandparents. I acknowledge, first, those four who gave who gave me life. My next breath is for all those who married into the family after death or divorce, who were part of my life. As I walk this second longest track, I think about who they were to me, both good and bad. I accept their flaws and I leave behind what I don’t need.

On the third and longest track, riding the outer edge of the labyrinth, I open my solar plexus chakra, where energy and ego live. I open to my eight great-grandparents, one of whom I was fortunate to know in life. One step in front of another, I contemplate my mortality and the truth that my path will someday be ghost footprints across the earth. Just as most of my great-grandparents were unknown by me, someday I will be unknown to others. There is a breaking and a humbling in this track. One step in front of another, walking the edge of the labyrinth.

At the end of the track, I cross the short bridge that joins the solar and heart paths and turn, opening the compassion of my heart. I accept what it means to be alive. I accept what it means to live. I call forth to my sixteen 2x great-grandparents, who saw the effects of the Civil War and lived the turning into the 20^th century. I am grateful for how many of their stories I know. They were people like me, with families of their own, wondering what the future held. Wondering what their ancestors were like.

The shortest path rides the edge of the center. This is the track of the throat chakra, an energy center which sees a lot of action in our everyday lives. I slow my steps and open to my 32 3x great-grandparents, ones who braved wild territory to start anew. I can feel the slip stream of time as ghost steps crowd the path behind me.

Together, we turn onto the sixth track. I pull my energy and breath up into the third eye chakra, just above and behind the eyes, where empathy lives. I invite my sixty-four 4x great-grandparents to join me, and I feel my thoughts sinking deeper into my bloodstream. The fact that I only exist because those sixty-four people lived and loved is overwhelming.

I walk the final turn of the labyrinth with my one hundred and twenty-five 5x great-grandparents. One hundred and twenty-five! I think about all of those people, and the children they had who were not my direct ancestors, and the children their children had… how many cousins might their be that I will never know or meet? For a moment, I imagine I can understand what eternity means, and what it means that we are all part of the same well of energy. I open the top of my crown chakra, prepared to meet them face to face.

When I enter the center of my meditation, I am standing in the center of the labyrinth with two hundred and fifty-four spirits. They are the collective spirits of the first seven generations of my family tree. I am two hundred and fifty-five. I am a pillar of energy. I am walking in ancestral fire. I sit in the center and open to whatever visitations might occur.

When I am ready, I return the way I came. There is only one path to the labyrinth and the ways in and out are the same. As I leave, I pull my energy back down through my body, pulling my awareness back until I am me, in my body, feet on the earth. I thank each generation for journeying with me, for their part in giving me life. I return humbled, deeply connected, and surprisingly sure-footed. 

Click on this link to find a labyrinth near you!

Plugging Into Nature

I have an Ancestor Altar on top of a small bookshelf in my office. I use it as a place to leave offerings and prayers, and for doing spirit work. I use the construction of an altar as a meditation on creating a sacred space. The meditative intention, layered over the last one builds a history of sacred purpose and sacred energy. Nature is my temple, and immersing myself in it connects me to divine energy. Magic is all around us.

Once a year I go on retreat to a festival in the mountains. For a week I unplug from the electrical appliances of the industrial world and I plug into the mountain, into the stone, into the air, the stars and into the water. It is a spiritual balm unlike any other and reminds me of yearly childhood camping trips with my family. We spent our summers discovering the landscape of the state we lived in: the Finger Lakes, the Catskills, the Adirondacks, the 1,000 Islands, various creeks and gorges, all of the old-time re-enactment villages, the underground caverns, etc.

One of the places we took frequent family trips to was Arrowhead Campground, remembered most fondly for the crazy year the inchworms were literally raining from the treetops. On one trip, my brother and I were exploring the woods and we found a giant pine tree that had fallen during the winter. We saw something when we climbed beneath it, that it was something more than just a dying thing. We spent two afternoons together fleshing out its skeleton with sticks and rocks and moss until it resembled the other thing we saw. We disappeared under that tree and we slipped into a crack in the earth.

That spot was special and we both sensed it. Normally we would have wanted to show it off and I didn’t understand then what kept us silent. We even managed to stay quiet as our parents passed right beside us, wondering aloud at what we were up to that they hadn’t seen us around. We were safe in the bubble of that beautiful, dying pine tree, in both this world and another.

Have you ever found a spot in nature that feels that way to you? A place you like to escape to, to unplug from the world? A place you only reveal to people you feel close to? I have dozens of spots like this. Everywhere I go there is a place that speaks to me, something that pulls at me. Some tree, or rock or clearing.

I believe that I am drawn to these spots because other good energy has been laid down there before me. It could be as simple as the echo of every person who has stopped there and been momentarily spellbound. It could be an ancient place people used to gather. It could be the oldest spot in the woods and it could be the youngest. I don’t think it matters so much why those spots call to me. I think what matters, is that I can sense it, that my heart is open enough to hear it.

These places feel as sacred as altars to me. When I find them in the natural world, its more sense than sight. That sense feels kind of fuzzy and unclear. But I am drawn to add to it, to leave offerings as if it were a holy shrine. I think about bringing the shrine to life like creating a painting, by adding color and texture to create clarity.

I soft focus my senses so that I am taking in everything without any one thing pulling my focus and I walk around the space, feeling out what spots sing to me. Where do I feel the wonder? Where does the energy seem to concentrate? How can I make that more obvious to other eyes?

I take objects from the space itself, sticks, stones, feathers, the odd bone, and move them to another spot in the space where it feels better to me, and I’m no longer surprised to see patterns emerge. The more pieces I move, the sharper into focus the good feeling becomes, until it hums. When my skin hums I know it is good. I have laid another layer of good energy down in that space. I have acknowledged it as sacred and left behind a bit of magic for someone else to discover.

Dream Vision from my Ancestors




An original illustration from a dream vision, private collection.

 

A name trips across my tongue and dances upon my lips. Robert Moulton… born 1495 in Ormesby, a small village in North Yorkshire, England. Robert, who was alive when Columbus announced his discovery of a New World, Robert and his wife and their two-year old son John. My ancestors who were alive when a Spaniard crossed a vast black space called Ocean and found alien life on a new planet.

What did they think when the news reach their ears of a land on the other side of the ocean, strange and new and unending? Was it another story woven by fairies, or did it alter the landscape of their world? Did it change the axis of their importance in their centric universe? Did it fill them wonder?

In a dream, I am standing on an island, my feet buried in white sand, surrounded by water of a jeweled peacock hue. This is my island and the island is me, I know the edges of its boundary well. There are dark grey rocks off shore, with sun-bleached crags jutting out of the water at varying degrees. They are close, they are near and I call them Father and Mother, Grandfather, Grandmother, Uncle and Sister. In the light of the morning sun I walk in the shallows among them.

Further away, where the water deepens, grey tips cut through watery skin, stones called Great-Grandmother and Great-Great-Grandfather. Each generation before me spreads out, sinking beneath the sea. The monuments lie beneath, lie within, whether my eyes can see them or not. They are there because they were.

            The ancestors whisper into me with the ebb and retreating flow of tide, leaving gifts of shell and crab, driftwood and stone behind. The ocean pulses out there, somewhere beyond what my eyes can see. There is a pull, a vibration in the water as if a voice is trying to stretch through time to reach me.

I whisper back into the roar of the surf, “I am collecting the driftwood. I am building a boat. I will find my way back to you.”

Perspective & Gratitude: A Creative Meditation

Perspective

I am sitting at my desk, in my rented apartment, thinking about the world and my place in its vastness. If I reach out I can feel the other minds, other lives, other heartbeats creating the low percussive pulse of life on this planet. Somewhere else in my town, at this moment, a child is trying not to see the monsters in the shadows of their bedroom. It is all they know of the world, still so small, that exists within the walls of their home. In Buffalo some young man whose world is expanding with possibilities that might take him beyond the borders of the city he grew up in is about to learn that he’s going to be a father. It’s true and it’s happening right now.

In Ohio, a man who raises bison is watching the herd while bartering for feed from another farmer. A high school student in Wyoming just unzipped his backpack to discover that he left his homework in his locker. A woman in California, who has rented all her life, is closing on her first home and opening a bottle of champagne saved from her last office party in celebration. It’s all happening right now.

In Hawaii, a mother is recovering from surgery to remove her breast cancer in a pink hospital. Her family is worried, waiting for news from her doctor. Waiting to hear whether the margins are clear. A man in Florida woke up and went to work, like he does every day, seven days a week, so that he can feed his family and pay the bills. If he can pick up a third job, he might be able to set some money aside for college for his eldest son.

A family in Peru is celebrating their father’s eighty-sixth birthday with candles and music, good food and company. A man in Moscow burned the egg he was cooking and is leaning into the fridge for another. So many heartbeats, dancing together, criss-crossing and entwining, right now. Reach out and become part of the web of life.

Gratitude
As I sit at my desk

I have gratitude for my clothes and garden,

for family and a full belly,

for hands flitting across computer keys-

for the someone preparing to rise and go to work
where their hands will harvest flax which will be beaten down,
the fibers spun into thread and woven into lengths of cloth

to be dyed in various and multiple hues
and sold by the bolt to another factory,
where it will be cut into pattern pieces,

sewn and assembled as a shirt,

packaged in a box with hundreds of duplicates
to be sold to a company who will distribute it to a store,

delivered by a truck driver
and unpacked by a stockperson,
hung on a rack by a clerk
and bought by my hands,
brought to my house by so many hands
so I might wear it, sitting at my desk,

creating words.

I am grateful for the food in my belly and the clothes on my flesh.
May it be so.

Ase.

Welcome Home

My name is Sarah,
Daughter of Margaret, of Patricia, of Margaret...
The mothers of my mother.
Daughter of Phil, of Ruth, of Minnie, of Emma, of Ordelia...
The mothers of my father.
My name is Sarah,
Daughter of Margaret, of Richard, of Harold, of LaFayette, of Marquis DeLafayette...
The fathers of my mother.
Daughter of Phil, of Mark, of Royal, of Bennett, of Solomon Gool...
The fathers of my father.

I honor those who came before me,
Whose bones I stand on.
What is remembered in me,
Lives on in me.

Ase.